As well as her own pre-loved pieces, there are also bargains from some of her fashionable friends, including Cond Nast Traveller's fashion director Martha Ward and chic interiors store owner Alex Eagle. Where I would usually be wearing some sort of boho embroidered dress before, it just wasnt formal enough, you needed couture. . 10:55 EST 03 Nov 2020 Sergei, who left Russia in 2011, claims that relations between him and Putin cooled, due to his relationship with the Russian leader calling him a 'traitor' for dating 'English woman' Alexandra, the Kremlin tried to seize or destroy his business empire. When I was in Sergeis chteau, he wouldnt really let me do anything anyway. 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Estimate: 2,000-2,500. I feel were moving to a new phase and thats exciting, she says. I went quite street. 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Please, The subscription details associated with this account need to be updated. But an experience like that opens your mind. The interior and collection speaks not only of her love of the traditional English country house, but also of her Russian family heritage, innate personal sense of style and a strong desire to create a special home for her children. 111K followers. , updated I gave 5500 from the proceeds to St Gregorys Foundation, a charity that helps underprivileged children in Russia. She organises adventurous horse riding holidays in Kyrgyzstan, and runs The Tolstoy Edit, a curated shop of her favourite interiors discoveries. 'It was a great pleasure to be able to fully utilise such a diverse and highly personal selection of works of art, furniture and objects in a family home but also to be surrounded by objects that I took great huge pleasure from every day. He was in a public dispute with Vladimir Putin, so it was dangerous for us to visit Russia for a long time. ALEXANDRA TOLSTOY Adventurer and mother, writer, broadcaster and occasional designer When I was with Sergei, I stopped reading so much of that 19th-century literature which Im so passionate about With the life I live now, emotionally and mentally I can romantically dream and escape whereas then, it was so stultifying., I wonder if, like her fashion sense, her interior design interests were affected during her time with Sergei, as one might imagine they would be, but she says that they werent: Weirdly, the interior decorating never changed I could afford more things, but [Sergei] didnt really give me the opportunity to do very much the taste never changed there at all. I just had to pack my suitcase and I could go.'. I think its difficult for anybody in those circumstances to be creative; how can you be original? I think whats prepared me has been all those adventures I did, like riding the silk road, riding through Mongolia; I went for months when it was pre-mobile phone we had no connection with the world outside When I was eighteen I lived in Moscow for six months and really did nothing but read books and learn Russian. Contestant shares behind the scenes secrets from the hit quiz show - revealing there's NO studio audience and how the Chaser's identity is kept secret, The ultimate pre-lockdown to-do list! Talking about her pursuit of an exquisitely domestic lifestyle, Alexandra says that its not just aesthetic, it does also go with a kind of freedom of thought, doesnt it? She was born in Poole, Dorset. Mr Pugachev denies the allegations and claims Moscow is trying to steal 11billion of his assets, including two shipyards and the world's largest mine. Countess Alexandra Tolstoy whose oligarch ex was known as 'Putin's banker' auctions off 250,000 of antiques that decorated her 12million London home before she was evicted after he fell foul. He got a prison sentence in the UK so he wont come back. Alexandra Tolstoy is leading a riding trip through Kyrgyzstan in June; from 3,598pp, full-board (ampersandtravel.com). I met the father of my three children, Sergei Pugachev, a banker formerly in Putins inner circle, in 2009. Alexandra Tolstoy Travel I fell so in love with him. I went to Yasnaya Polyana (which means clear glade) Tolstoys former home, which is 125 miles south of Moscow. Countess Alexandra Tolstoy's Colefax and Fowler interiors are up for sale at Christie's, for Tatler 3rd November 2020 The writer, equestrian and socialite talks to Tatler about the decision to auction off the pieces that made her Chelsea home impossibly chic. 2023 Getty Images. I never failed to fill one. I started Preloved by Alexandra Tolstoy with a friend we sell second-hand designer items via Instagram by doing this huge sale of my own clothes. Theyre just beautiful and Ill pass them on to my daughter. Being in these places is, to me, the ultimate luxury. Its a safari-type adventure; we stay in the most beautiful locations. She picks up the telephone, and I can hear the excited chatter of the children who are going into the sitting room to be read a Just William story by their grandfather. I went on to take groups every year between 2002 and 2009, and was leading a tour the week before my wedding. Tolstoy is alluding to the discomfort which these indulgences eventually came to signify for her, leading her away from her instinctive style and appreciation for tradition towards a struggle to fit in and conform to being the sort of woman Pugachev and his circle expected. [8], In the summer of 1948, Tolstaya met 18 year old future United States Senator Mike Gravel, who had intended to volunteer for the Israeli forces in a fight to defend the state of Israel, and she allegedly told him to instead "go on back home and finish school", to which he complied. Those Monaco wedding couture commissions and a tweed Chanel cardigan (they did a Scottish collection which is the kind of thing I love because its all about the countryside, so Ive kept that). Were still in touch now. Offered in Alexandra Tolstoy: An Interior by Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, 4-25 November, Online, Their bedroom was like a little world of its own, full of imagination and toys and pictures and books, she says. Alexandra worked closely with the London-based interior designers and decorators Emma Burns and Daniel Slowik of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler Interiors from 2008 onwards to create her family home, where she lived for 12 years. Some people dont care about aesthetics, but for me, to be creative is really part of my DNA. Alexandra tells me how her appreciation for books and visual arts were completely crushed: I couldnt do anything; the luxury afforded to her nevertheless impeded her fundamental desire to be productive and freedom to explore creatively. Inside the sad decline of 'Fairy Floss Girl': How the racegoer who shot to fame when Kyle Sandilands gushed that Waleed Aly and Sarah Harris issue a grovelling apology on The Project after backlash for laughing along with Man dies 'after being shot at home': Police Scotland hunt 'gunman' as they appeal for information. Student journalism does not come cheap. After visiting Sergei at their chteau in France, where he was physically violent towards her, locked their passports in a safe and smashed her mobile phone, Alexandra managed to return with the children to the UK and now lives between her small country cottage in Oxfordshire and their London townhouse, which she was forced to sell in a deal with the Russian authorities (though thankfully can remain in residence each month until it sells). In the film, she bursts into tears as she considers what shell do when that comes to pass. She grew up in Oxfordshire before going to Edinburgh University to study philosophy. The couple met in 2008 after Sergei hired Alexandra to help improve his English while they were both living in Russia, where Sergei was once-close friends with Putin. Stephanie Linning For Mailonline Authorities froze his assets, put him on Interpol's wanted list and obtained a court order in Britain forcing him to hand over his passports. Soon after, Tolstoy a distant relative of the novelist Leo Tolstoy called on Slowik, who was then head of the firms antiques department, to transform what she describes as a white shell into an incredible home. It was a therapeutic process. For her almost 50,000 Instagram followers (@alexandratolstoy), these memories of oligarch-style trophy buys will be impossible to conflate with the idyllic look she now encapsulates. To say Alexandra Tolstoy has lived a colourful life is somewhat of an understatement. Mothers share the things they want to remember this time around - including going to the tip, picking up craft supplies and having acrylic nails taken off, Britain's first blind and deaf trainee medic reveals she's spent 'more time as a patient than a doctor-to-be' during a nightmare year where she was made homeless and spent three months in hospital. I did really lose myself in that period and Ive started dressing in a way that just wasnt me. 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